


tomorrow

by VerdantMoth



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-08 19:59:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18630262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: “Put the bottle down, brother,” Loki says soft and sad.“Tomorrow,” Thor answers.





	tomorrow

_Tomorrow_ , Thor thinks, _I’ll put the bottle._  
 _I’ll put it down because we will win. Because we bring them back, and Loki will take it from me._

He tilts the brown glass back and he doesn't taste the warm, stale liquid. He stumbles blindly about the tiny little cottage he’s called home in this new kingdom.

The place reeks. Spilt liquor, sweat, unidentifiable foods gone to waste. There are people he knows, just beyond his door. People who clamor about his windows demanding…

Begging for a king who never asked for his crown. They don’t need him though. He’s seen Valkeryie walking amongst her people, finding her place again. They smile, they bow with their eyes. She orders them about with soft commands and gentle words in this stupid little stone corner of a borrowed planet they’re hiding on flourishes.

Thor fucking hates it.

Hates her for bearing his crown better than he ever could, than he ever wanted.

He hates her for how she wields her loneliness like a staff, supporting herself, strengthening herself.

She, like he, has no one but the people building a new home under a foreign sky, and she acts like it’s everything she trained for.

He tilts a bottle, green this time, and the liquid sloshes through the matted hair on his chin. And he swallows until he thinks he dreams.

Loki is there, in his not-dreams. “I told you brother,” the snake whispers.

Thor crushes him beneath his heel. He drinks, and he grows soft, until his belly spills beneath his leathers and over the edges of the sweats he steals from a tower he used to know.

And they come to him, people not his own, demanding his help.

He doesn’t want to help. He doesn’t want to watch them greet their own when he knows.

The wrong snap took his brother. Took the last of the good in him.

“But I’m still here,” Loki taunts, skimming winter-dagger fingers where muscle once strained. His voice is ice in Thor’s ears and heat against his neck and bile in his throat.

Thor yells at pixels on a screen when they flicker gold and green. When for a moment they’re Jotunn blue and the laughter in his ears echoes from copies.

 _Help them,_ Loki hisses when the barrel is empty, spilled down his throat, down his shirt, down between his legs too warm in the early morning. _Be who I…_

Be who Loki defied Thanos for.

So he tries. Thor, he, he doesn’t put the bottle down. He can’t. Not yet. Loki isn’t in his arms. But he travels with them and he kisses his mother’s cheek once more and he looks but Loki is always a ghost against his neck and cheap ale in his belly.

He gets his hammer back though, and it almost feels like home.

It’s a familiar weight at least, compared to the pounds he carries on his skeleton. _Too much_ , Loki taunts. _You’ll never defeats Thanos soft and supple._

Thor things Loki doesn’t mean for the fondness to linger.

But they do, defeat Thanos. And he thinks he should grieve for all those they lost. For the Widow forgotten at the bottom of a ravine. For the man of Iron who saved the galaxy.

For the captain who abandoned his people to love the life denied them all.

He doesn’t. He can’t.

He’s not sure who keeps supplying him fizzy drinks. Maybe the sons who cannot stop their own grief.

They join him sometimes, when Loki is quit. They sit, side by side and curled into each other, and Thor wonders who else sees their hands fastened. Or the tears that stain their lips.

He wonders which of the saviors of the world watch the boys slink away to a room to carve their sorrow into each other’s skin, to bite their rage into shoulders and pound their grief in rhythm.

“It gets better,” he tells them once. His hands are shaking though, and he’s cold. And all the weight that warmed him has fallen from his bones.

They look at him like the liar he is and he amends his statement “It gets better when you have each other.”

They blush. Loki laughs and for a moment Tony’s sons startle like they could hear it.

They can’t. Loki stopped laughing at Thor a while ago. Now he sits at the edge of the bed Thor can barely leave and says “come to me.”

Thor wants to. Fuck but he wants to. He slings green and brown and blue glass at the wall and screams until the skies shake. Until he’s given an empty plot of land and all the space he could ever dream for.

His cries drown the earth and his rage burns the trees and sometimes Tony’s sons bring him large crates of too much liquid that puts him to sleep for days.

Loki screams louder than the thunder and lightning until he wakes up. _Don’t do that, Thor. It isn’t time._

But time is meaningless when they can traipse back and forth through out it and still his brother is gone.

Thor drinks and he shakes and he’s always cold. The world blurs in and out and he stumbles back and forth and they find him, the remainders. The ones who forgot those who are gone.

They try to feed him, try to take blue-green-brown from his hands and bath him and trim the beard so matted it’s firm and he tells them “The sun will again shine.”

“It is shining, Thor.” Peter says.  
“Come out side,” Harley adds.

He does. He sweats and shakes and reeks under a sun Loki hated.

And then he remembers a cliff, looking over a sea and he goes there.

He stands on the edge and he drinks until the water rises to meet him. Until he can feel Loki against his skin for the first time in a decade.

“Put the bottle down, brother,” Loki says soft and sad.

“Tomorrow,” Thor answers. Because the water is rushing around him and tomorrow Loki will hold him against silver grass where they’ll find their family and never again be separated.


End file.
